What say you, then,
to times when half the city shall break out
Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?
To executions, to a street on fire,
Mobs, riots, or rejoicing? From those sights
Take one,--an annual festival, the Fair...
--William Wordsworth, The Prelude (7:644-49).
Walter Benjamin writes that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, "fear, revulsion and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it" (174). Besides Baudelaire, Benjamin quotes Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A. Hoffman. He could have mentioned Wordsworth who, early on, had confronted and then described, perhaps more explicitly than anybody else, what amounts to a traumatic encounter with the modern crowd.
According to Freud, the trauma must have compared to a shower of stimuli impinging upon the too young ego of the subject. What the mental apparatus of the individual could not possibly shield and protect itself against, Freud explains, was nothing in particular. It was, Lacan adds, Das Ding an sich, La Chose received from nowhere and everywhere at once. It was "quelque chose du réel" which could not stay tranquil (stay put) in the ordered space of pleasing perception, and beyond, of satisfying representation (71-86).1
I would like to show that the Freudian notion of the shock illuminates Wordsworth's experience of the urban crowd, "This Parliament of Monsters" dramatically represented in the celebrated pages of "Residence in London." In Book VII of The Prelude, the narrator magnifies his horror (and fascination) at the sight of the streets in the big city. While in solitude and from the midst of regained tranquillity, Wordsworth recalls the shock received in the extended figure of the Vanity Fair which circulated at the end of the eighteenth century (Stallybrass 119). Singular, however, is the intensity, the force of the horror felt (and conveyed to us, his readers) by the Romantic poet. The modern crowd is shocking because it forbids exchange. It comes at "you" (rather than to "you") too early and too soon.
Proliferation and the Question of Poetry
Already in 1798, in The Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth recalls the "din/ of towns and cities... The still, sad music of humanity" he escaped in order to return to the beauty, ease, freedom and tranquillity offered by the contact with natural forms. Indeed the "sweet inland murmur" of the Wye river came like a Paradise Regained after "many wanderings" in Hell. It was heard with the joy of relief, returning home after too long a stay amidst unbearable noise and sights, the pandemonium that generate "evil tongues,/ Rash judgments... the sneers of selfish men"--all that which makes "The dreary intercourse of daily life" in urban settings.
Certainly, Wordsworth never was a happy flâneur in the city. He did not like to walk with the crowd and lose himself in it. He was not at all seduced by prostitute beauties. He did not urge the artist to be "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne" who paces execution of short poems and stories with newspapers production, answering modernity blow for blow; nor did he build an aesthetics of the artificial and the "bizarre," as did Hoffman, Baudelaire and Poe. Wordsworth rejected London and thought of it, of almost everything in it, as part of a dangerous, frightening, "monstrous ant-hill on the plain/ Of a too busy world" (7:149-150).2 He could still afford to think, and live, as if what he met there of nouveauté was avoidable. Yet Wordsworth was as much a poet of The Modern and of The New as Baudelaire ever was because he took in the experience of the city, described it and placed it at the center of his work.
Both as a poet and a critic, Wordsworth is one of the first, with William Blake, to ask a historical question: how is lyrical poetry to survive numbers, crowds being only the concrete emergence in the streets of statistics. Is it still possible to experience beauty--to sing it--amidst a proliferation of industrial products? How is one to share distinctive feelings within such levelling of beings who are all made to feel the same? Will the man of today, the man of the crowd, not so much understand, but even care to listen to the voice of the poet?3
Singularity does not exist in:
An undistinguishable world to men,
The slaves unrespited of low pursuits,
Living amid the same perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end (7:699-704).
Shocks and Stimulants
We remember the opening lines of Les Fleurs du Mal, which address the eventual readers where Baudelaire expected to find them, in the worst possible posture for lyrical poetry--in bed: "La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine,/ Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps/ Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan.../ C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!"
Baudelaire has decided to shock and attack "us" readers, by mocking "us" altogether, in "our" mass I would say, calling "us" vicious libertines, potential murderers, cowards, liars, and finally "hypocrite[s]" who, asleep and bored to death, could easily go to extremes, i.e., reduce the world to a field of debris. Out of boredom, could we not swallow everything in a fantastic yawn--pushing buttons might be added in 1999--without ever having to face the consequences? What defines the too-many is a profound lack of consciousness, a universal numbness. The most horrifying in the multitude is its lack of sense that there is horror, sin, idiocy, mass-murder collectively produced: "Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;/ Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas,/ Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent."
In Au Lecteur, Baudelaire adopts the only counter-tactic able to wake "us" up from sleep: the shock. The notion of shock is everywhere in Baudelaire's criticism. Praising the type of short poem he created, Baudelaire says: "Un poème ne mérite son titre qu'autant qu'il excite, qu'il enlève l'âme" (25). The audience needs to be struck by force and drawn into the poem: "tirés de force." Due to the limitation of human "ténacité d'enthousiasm"--"our" physiological ability to sustain excitations--the elements of a poem should all converge in one rapid blow on the head. The shock-effect cannot last and that is why the perfectly organized and rapidly executed short work is the only choice for Baudelaire.
Wordsworth apparently favors the poem of epic proportions which takes a lifetime to "recollect in tranquillity," as he says in the famous line of The Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But if we ask why the crowds, why "we" in "our" opaque mass, need the medicine of poetry in the first place, Wordsworth's answer is that of Baudelaire: because "we" have been driven to sleep.
A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor (Preface 436).
The situation is already in 1802 at its worst. Poetic acts happen when readers are active, Wordsworth specifies, giving something of themselves in return. Passivity would not do because reception of lyrical poetry requires an effort on the part of the addressee, a tension or attention of all the faculties, sensual, imaginative and intellectual. But life in the city is possible, indeed bearable, only when a certain level of shock has been accepted, enough to "blunt" distinction or difference, enough for people to follow the same traffic signs, read the same newspapers and feel happy on similar occasion:
The most effective of these [blunting] causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incidents, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies (436).
Their physical being in a constant state of shock or "torpor" and their creativity asleep, what people have an inextinguishable thirst for is "the outrageous stimulation... the gross and violent stimulants," i.e., the catastrophic head-lines--big-budget movies, we might add today--massive shocks, more passive absorption and at an ever faster pace. "We" sleep to survive the shocks, and "we" desire more stimulants to stay pleasantly asleep. Only a very unpleasant shock at the end, an absolute catastrophe, could break the vicious circle. Or something which, though producing as well some kind of shock, would depart from stimulants, would go as it were in the opposite direction, forcing each one, not to cry and laugh in unison with the crowd, but in connection with the increasingly forgotten dimension of social intercourse: the "discriminating powers of the mind," the differentiating past, the intimate and personal Erfahrung, the most private and singular experience.
No wonder that in the Prospectus where he lays out the method of his entire poetry, Wordsworth can, at once, pledge to use modest "words/ Which speak of nothing more than what we are," while in "this... our high argument," he identifies with no less than the Redemptor of Mankind, clearly expecting apocalyptic results from his "simple" poetic action. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as though to counteract and compensate for the void left by vacillating beliefs, poetry takes on an immense responsibility: resurrect Albion, whose fallen body represents for William Blake the interchangeable people petrified in the Metropolis; "arouse the sensual," the addicted masses, says Wordsworth, "from/ Their sleep of Death" (Recluse 263).
Bildung and Distance
The solution for Wordsworth is to leave London and return home in the country, in order not to forget but precisely to recollect, recreate and assimilate, in the midst of tranquillity, the horror and danger experienced.
The act of coming back always has a complex structure in Wordsworth. Evidently, writing poetry comes after a long and hard process. Intercourse with lovely, peaceful and harmonious nature is not complete without the actual remembrance of its opposite: the violence inflicted by the city on the senses and the intelligence. After what The Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey call "five long winters," Wordsworth returns to the Wye river. But he does not regret "the coarser pleasures of [his] boyish days"--what happened during his immediate contact with the place. The man who comes back is not the one who left. If at first there was a sensual relationship between the local natural creatures and his "glad animal movements" among them, "That time is past... and all its dizzy raptures": it has been fractured by the mighty London where escalating numbers confused the eye and assaulted the ear. "Harsh" and "grating" sounds were not only unpleasant to the senses, however; encounter with proliferation was not simply frightening to the mind: it built within the biography of a man the contrasting experience necessary to come back as a poet. Now, in the present tense of his poem, Wordsworth does not connect with nature as he used to:
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity... (87-91).
"There are ways and means enough," Freud will write, "of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind for the sake of pleasure" (17).4
And
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused (93-96).
Ennobling, sublime vision into the ultimate "life of things" is now possible; but it concerns much more than the actual banks of the Wye river: "All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts" (7:103). "The eye made quiet by the power of/ Harmony" is an adult eye which does not simply look at rocks and woods in order to find stimulant, gain instant pleasure. It is an eye which sees through forms (and sounds) in order to obtain the mediated, and therefore appeased "joy" that comes with knowledge. Whereas, for the boy, nature "had no need of a remoter charm,/ By thought supplied," the man who comes back sees in the distance because his educated gaze is imbued with memory, however "harsh" and "grating". And it was actually the same contrasting thoughts and sense of distance which allowed Wordsworth to survive London. Now, looking through the countryside that surrounds him, talks gently to him and brings him "serene and blessed mood," Wordsworth remembers how his body never forgot, how his "heart" never betrayed, this countryside. Feeling lonely then, without communication with anything or anybody though surrounded by vociferous crowds, Wordsworth found enough peace within to proceed in the poetic journey because he had kept the most faithful souvenirs, a physiological record of "these forms of beauty" --:
...oft, in lonely rooms...
I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration.
It is the insistence of absence, the hole in being brought by memory, the sheer inexistence of what is not around, which each time puts in perspective the imminent and captivating presence--natural or urban--distancing it enough for Wordsworth to move about, sublimate and survive.
Exchange and the Grotesque
When distance collapses, when people and things get too close, become too-many, presence turns to omnipresence, pain invades body and soul: there is nowhere to flee but in paralysis.5 What defines the shock as trauma is the total lack of distance which impedes movements, response and exchange.6 We could again talk about the inevitable numbness, the blank faces and irresponsive looks, the well known insensibility and inhumanity of individuals lost in crowds. But we are rather thinking about the dramatic opposition with which, Book I, line 1, The Prelude opens. Here again, the narrator recalls having been imprisoned and crushed, literally overpowered, brutalized by the City. And again, he is presently set free, to move under the clouds, to inhale the breeze, to respond to the outside, to choose where to go, what friendly "twig or any floating thing" to converse with:
O there is blessing in this gentle breeze...
O Welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city's walls set free,
A prison where he has long been immured.
Now I am free. …
I breathe again! (1:1-6,19)
The next future is much brighter than it was in Tintern Abbey, a short poem, which marked only a short return. This time: "Long months of ease and undisturbed delight/ Are mine in prospect." Much more severe is also the verdict against urbanity, and the contrast with natural settings:
................it is shaken off
As by miraculous gift 'tis shaken off
The burden of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary days
Not mine, and such as were not made for me (1:21-25).
Hardened within himself to buffer and shield against too busy a city, the poet had accepted "mind forg'd manacles" to grow around his ego, making of his "own" weak self a shell to use Blakean words, a selfish and self-centered cell, barred from others and from the world. In Songs of Experience, the poem called London goes: "I wander thro' each charter'd street,/ Near where the charter'd Thames does flow./ And mark in every face I meet/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe." Divided, walled within and without, peopled with souls as incommunicative as bricks, the prison of London was perfect.
On the contrary, what comes now from outside and "beats against [his] cheek" is no hail of stimuli the poet needs to protect himself from. It is a calling heard in the distance, "from the green fields/ And from the sky,"--it is an address made by an intelligence whose voice is as distinguishable as was that of angels, for "this gentle breeze... seems half-conscious of the joy it gives." And as it distinctly calls from the open, it engages dialogue; it prompts a response and inspires exchange:
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A corresponding mild creative breeze...
Which, breaking up a long-continued frost,
Brings with it vernal promises, the hope
Of active days... (7:41-6)
After the winter of universal isolation, retraction and passivity in the city, a natural spring brings the thaw of communication and creation. From a psychoanalytical perspective, one would think that these repeated and rather trivial metaphors do not explain anything and only give poetical garb, sublime elevation, justification to a biographical choice. Returning home to the countryside could not but mean looking back toward the first object of love, particularly absent in the case of Wordsworth--his mother, whose voice he then imagines calling him from every corner of Nature.7 After all, why did he, I mean the narrator of The Prelude, not make more friends in London? Apparently, he could not even heed the voices of his brilliant contemporaries among the crowd.8 Why (and of what exactly) was he so Romantically nostalgic?
Book II is indeed quite explicit in calling the mother the original source of all exchange, the "one beloved Presence," with whom "by intercourse of touch/ I held mute dialogues."9 But this is slightly besides the point, which is that, in The Prelude, Wordsworth intends to register a danger and send the alarm. The threat, to be more precise, does not even stem from the crowd. It all depends on what type of crowd. It all hinges on the too-many, the threshold of which varies probably from individual to individual, but more likely from time to time, as the shocking of yesterday fades out. Beyond a certain level of stimuli, the psyche enters into a crisis where exchange between subjects, subjects and objects, therefore activity altogether, human creativity, is not simply thwarted, but implodes, starts mocking itself and turns to grotesque.
This is particularly clear if we look at two very different gatherings, both described as fairs at a few pages distance of The Prelude:
................. What a shock
For eyes and ears! What anarchy and din
Barbarian and infernal,--a phantasma,
Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound!(7:658-61)
The narrator is facing "an annual festival, the Fair/ Holden where martyrs suffered in past time" (7:650). What is so wrong with this celebrating crowd? Why does it epitomize "blank confusion! and a type not false/ Of what the mighty City is itself" (7:695)? Why should these people appear as "buffons against buffons/ Grimacing, writhing, screaming... perverted things/ All freaks of nature... All jumbled up together to make up/ This Parliament of Monsters" (7:671-91)? Why has the ritual, traditional festival of St Bartholomew become such a torture to the five senses, such a disgust to the mind? Why does it finally present "A work that's finished in our hands, that lays,/ If any spectacle on earth can do,/ The whole creative powers of man asleep!" (7:652)? Because it does not leave room for the visitor to interact. This crowd has reached the traumatic point of the too-much-to-bear by filling the perspective up to the brim. This picture is "by nature an unmanageable sight" because it has no beyond, no Other, no horizon (7:708). It strips the spectator of any "under-sense of greatness" (7:711). In sum, this offensive sight saturates the distance between background and foreground necessary to pleasant perception, thereby distorting any possible harmony among parts and whole. It does not even manage the difference between up and down, "above" and "below," which is a sine qua non condition for the beautiful encounter, be it that of an actual scenery or of an artistic representation:
Below, the open space, through every nook
Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive
With heads; the midway region and above,
Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls
Dumb proclamations...(7:662-6).
We may not be aware of it, Lacan went on repeating, but the visible is structured around a certain lack, distance, deferment, horizon, perspective--indeed "under-sense" that something is not there. Whenever the lack is lacking, "si le manque vient à manquer," then, instead of a desire to get closer to the real offered but deferred in the image, there arises anxiety in the subject before its overwhelming, claustrophobic insistence.10
These blunt stares of the crowd, these "dumb" signs cannot be answered. They do not expect a response; perhaps worse, they do not allow a response, and that is why they shock. They, these signs, these people bearing the signs (the tiredly commercial "Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs..." of the Fair) will have happened too soon, since when intercepted, they arrived as vulgar "finished" products. They will always have been received by the aesthetic faculty, the sensibility, as one does blows and projectiles, passively, against in any case the natural grain of the creative process which requires, if not "intercourse of touch," at least the lapse in time for a given subject to gaze back, muse and see.11 It was too late--this noisy, garish crowd was already there when it happened, on the person of the narrator so to speak.
We are now opening Book VIII. "It is a summer festival--a fair" and there is a "crowd... assembled in the gay green field" (8:5-10). Someone, the One, the Patriarch, "in the silence of his rest," presides over, gathers together, makes one the gathering below (8:14). From far and above, "his" profile marks the horizon, puts a limit to the field of perception and dominates the scene.12 It is Helvellyn, the local hill. The crowd below is small enough--"a little family of men,/ Twice twenty, with their children and their wives"--to gather as in the cradle of "his" arms, for "he" looks after it and protects it. Under storm or mist, people welcome the "delightful day" (8:16). Here nothing is inhuman, unfamiliar, uncanny or anxiety-provoking: everything belongs precisely to the family. In-offensive in their limited number, things, animals and humans come to you from afar--you narrator, "stranger," Prodigal Son returning home. Everything can still be orderly staged and differentiated. Whereas, in the urban crowd, "no one looks about,/ Nothing is listened to," here sounds are heard crisp and clear, few welcoming signs exchanged and visible objects visited where they belong (7:667-8). You find in yourself the disposition to answer them as they first took the time and entertained the disposition to reach you:
What sounds are those, Helvellyn, which are heard
Up to thy summit, through the depth of air
Ascending, as if distance had the power
To make the sounds more audible? What crowd
Is yon, assembled in the gay green field?
Crowd seems it, solitary hill! to thee,
Though but a little family of men,
Twice twenty, with their children and their wives,
And here and there a stranger interspersed (7:1-10).
Notice how Wordsworth gently mocks Helvellyn's naiveté, to think "it" oversees the crowd. Somewhat in spite of himself then, Wordsworth allows that the world over which this "natural" Other presides is henceforth going to be ever smaller and more fragile. <